Meet the Final Fantasy 14 heroes making the MMO's hardest content accessible to everyone else

gamesradar.com:

A group of Final Fantasy 14 players are running an entire operation dedicated to breaking down the barriers between fans and the MMO’s most brutal content.

Ultimate Raids bring together high-end bosses from a previous expansion’s campaign and raid content, remixing it all into a gauntlet you must clear in one attempt. It’s so tricky that developer Square Enix doesn’t consider it ‘progression’ content demanding completion to advance elsewhere, but rather a spectacle for fans to gather around as the most hardcore among them race to be among the world’s first to complete it.

If you do fancy tackling the challenge, you’ll likely be headed to the party finder feature to wrangle however many strangers needed to fill a team, unless you have seven pals on standby – a ‘static’, as it’s known in Final Fantasy 14. It was there that the idea for the ‘Ulti Project’ would come about, with a player called Sausage Roll jumping in with their friends to help others complete Ultimate raids for the first time.

“We did it mostly to sharpen classes apart from our main roles or simply because we wanted to hit the boss,” they tell me. “What really got me hyped up about it was the crazy reactions and pop-offs people have when they finally clear – so many different kinds of reactions, I love it! From there, we were hooked.”

Two years later, the Ulti Project – which you can find on Discord – has multiple groups working to a schedule to help one to three players at a time to get their first clear, all for free. Alongside providing the bodies needed to do the raid, they teach others how the mechanics work before and during the fight.

You'll need the benefit of timing to get involved, however. The Ulti Project runs at specific intervals throughout an